It was both business and pleasure, as my wife came with me to celebrate our 30th anniversary, which had been only a month earlier.The small package shown here on the left is the result of a quite interesting procceedure that was in fact the highlight of the trip for me.
Early in the morning, five buyers including myself piled into a shared van and drove about 3 hours from Bangkok to a small city called Chantiburi. It was a fascinating drive as we drove out of the big city of Bangkok and were quickly into rural areas. We saw lush greens, some fertile farms, and even areas where the houses were built on pilings so that the floors would be out of the water during the rainy season. You would almost have to have traveled yourself to understand the juxtoposition of the very poor next to the land of the prosperous, a shocking contrast that is rarely seen in this country.
On arrival in Chantaburi we were taken to a buyer's office. This was a very fascinating experience for me. The main floor was completely full, so we were taken to a room in the downstairs where the five of us were seated along the back wall. Each of us had a pad of paper, you know the kind, maybe 24 or so inches wide where you can rip off the top sheet when you have gotten it covered in notes. We also had a loupe, a pair of tweezers, a stone scoop and a calculator at each position. The five of us were seated on one side of the table, literally elbow to elbow and on the other side of the table sat the buyer's agent, who spoke English sufficient to our needs.
He asked each of us what we wanted to look at first and then turned to the door at his back and hollered out what each of us were looking for. Instantly fifty or sixty people crammed into the room and started thrusting stones at us, each in its own plastic bag if we were looking for larger stones, or in parcels of small stones if we were looking at smaller stones. I was looking for a nice blue zircon first and almost immediately someone reached a hand over the lady in front of him and dumped a parcel of stones onto my pad.
I turned to the buyers agent and said I had no interest, how did I tell him? He said scoop the stones and put them back into the bag, wave him off. I did. The lady he had shoved aside stood patiently and then thrust her hand into my face with a stone of gorgeous color but hideous native cutting, exactly what I wanted. I turned to the buyers agent and asked how do I ask the price?
He said, just point to the calculator. By the time I had turned back to her to point to the calculator she already had it in her hand and was entering in a number. I knew this from discussions with my companions on the way to Chantiburi to be the price per carat, in baht. I had to divide the number by the conversion rate to get the price in dollars, then divide that in 10 and then convert that back in to baht to show her my offer. I was trembling in my boots like a rookie poker player with a big hand hoping to get paid. (Okay, so I wasn't wearing boots, but you know what I mean.)
She looked at my offer, screamed something at me which I choose to translate as "You Crazy!" and input a new number into the calculator. I did the math again and found she was asking about 15% of her original price, a price well below what I had expected to pay so I offered 12% and a deal was struck.
I turned again to the buyer's agent and he told me to fill in one of the little offer sheets that I had. I did. He took the sheet, wrapped it around the plastic bag that we had put the stone back into and wrapped the whole thing in toilet paper and then wrapped that both length and width wise with scotch tape. I initialed the tape, he gave me one copy of the offer, kept one for himself and gave her the other and she took the stone and scuttled through the mob and back into the outer room. I asked where she was going with my stone and the buyer's agent said to be patient and look at more stones until she came back. I did.
A few minutes later she came back into the room and handed the offer to the buyer's agent. He looked at me and said my offer had been rejected, the owner of the stone was demanding $x for the stone which was about 14% of what I was originally asked. I countered with 13% she went back out of the room and came back a few minutes later with an acceptance of my counter to her counter. At that time she left the stone with the buyer's agent who sent it upstairs to their gemologist who would verify that it was indeed blue zircon and that it was natural blue zircon. This was the case for all stones, they guaranteed the identity of the stone, and that it was natural, not synthetic, but made no guarantee of whether or not any stones had been heat treated or diffusion treated, we had to know enough about buying gems to know this for ourselves. In the event that they were wrong, we actually had full recourse, which is why were there. The buyer's agent receives a 5% commission on all stones bought, paid by the seller.
I did similar transactions two or three times over the next hour when the guy next to me finally turned and said, "Would you knock it off?! You are paying too darn much for your stones and waffling when they come back with a counter offer, you are ruining things for the rest of us!"
He went on to advise me that once I had agreed on a price to let it go if I did not get it for that price. Soon I either got or did not get the stones at the original price, as word quickly spread as to who could be bluffed and who could not.
Enough for now, we will continue this next time
Wink
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